Death At Home

I've had this study on my to-read list for a while: "Actual and Preferred Place of Death of Home-Dwelling Patients in Four European Countries: Making Sense of Quality Indicators". Yeah, the title is a mouthful. To be honest, I skimmed the middle sections, because I wouldn't understand the statistics anyway. Hopefully the researchers' conclusions are solidly drawn. I selected a couple of pertinent quotes to share:

"[There] is a strong overlap between dying at home and dying in the preferred location, found in all countries."

// Roman Harak //

"Achieving a situation in which all patients die at home or all preferences are known might not be desirable or realistic. Home deaths may be suggested as an outcome of high-quality palliative care, but might give the impression that home deaths are the golden standard while for some patients this is not the best or preferred option. It misses out small minorities of patients who died in their preferred location elsewhere or who died at home without preferring home."

There ya go. Most people prefer to die at home, but not all of them. File that under, "I realize why you wanted to confirm your assumptions with data, but duh."

A less analytical investigation of domestic morbidity can be found in One Day Later, a photo collection by Bolshakov. The laconic description reads, "apartment of my grandfather in one day after his death". Just a few samples...